Iranian drone hits AWS Middle East data center, marking the first military attack on a large-scale cloud facility

According to 1M AI News monitoring, AWS confirmed that two of its data centers in the United Arab Emirates were “directly hit” by drones, causing two of the three availability zones to become inoperable; a facility in Bahrain was also damaged due to a nearby attack. This is believed to be the first military strike on the data centers of a global hyperscale cloud service provider.

Consumer applications such as online banking, payments, and food delivery experienced widespread outages in the UAE and Bahrain, with AWS working on repairs for several days. Fars News Agency, associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, stated on Thursday that Iran targeted facilities belonging to Amazon and Microsoft in recent attacks. Microsoft said there were no service disruptions in the region.

In a notice to customers, AWS stated that the operational environment in the Middle East “remains unpredictable” and advised customers to “immediately migrate workloads to other AWS regions.” However, cross-border migration involves sensitive data compliance, making it costly and complex for enterprise clients.

The attack poses a direct blow to the Gulf region’s ambitions for AI infrastructure. The UAE is building the Stargate supercomputing cluster for OpenAI in Abu Dhabi, and government-supported AI organizations Humain and G42 in Saudi Arabia and the UAE have signed large-scale data center agreements with Nvidia, Amazon, and Microsoft.

Jessica Brandt, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the attack “could fundamentally change how private investors, insurance companies, and tech firms assess risk in the region,” adding that “the Gulf is marketing itself as a safe alternative to other markets, and that argument is now harder to make.”